In reality, social media return is the value that you derive from your social media campaign. For instance, if the goal of your social media campaign is to drive sales, then your social media return is the number of sales that you can attribute to your social media campaign.

Instead of sales, say your goal is to drive consumer insights. In this case, your social media return is the quantity and quality of the consumer insights you get from your fans and followers.

A third example of social media return is brand awareness. If your goal is to drive awareness of your brand, then your social media return is brand awareness.

Monitoring will be replaced with predictive analytics to drive tangible revenue goals. It will be exciting to see how social media strategies morph and how a social media marketer can predict a transaction that will take place in the future, rather than inferring from real-time mentions.

The Holy Grail for marketers always has been, and always will be, cause-and-effect. The next wave in social analytics will be all about what we can actually do with our haystacks of mentions. And there are three areas of focus that any entrepreneur or technologist or investor should take to heart:

Influence: Players like Klout and PeerIndex provide sophisticated scores of influence. What is the FICO score of the social web? Sorting and prioritizing mentions by influence gives me, in return, more influence (over behavior, over conversation). Influence is fluid, but it is one of the best ways to understand how to react and respond when volume is overwhelming.

Sentiment: Sentiment grades tone and attitude regardless of influence. An especially good or bad sentiment can be impactful regardless of who is behind it. If anything, treating everyone with respect and responsiveness is how you build great brands. I can tell you from experience that sentiment is really hard to do right. A lot of people love to throw this term around. But there is opportunity here because there is a huge delta between the good and the great players in sentiment.

Intent: This is perhaps the most sophisticated of the three, because it combines technical competences involved in both influence and sentiment. Intent is about understanding how close someone is to a decision, based on content. It’s also a future-looking vector – it’s about understanding what is going to happen, instead of what just happened.

A study from Brandon Hall Group and Covario broke U.S. marketing executives down based on how long their company had been doing social media marketing. All respondents said social media was part of their integrated marketing strategy, but...
...Different expectations have also led to different opinions about the effectiveness of various social media venues. While 76% of less experienced marketers thought Facebook was the most effective social site, just 61% of more experienced marketers agreed. Facebook was still the top-rated site among marketers using social media for more than a year, but those social media veterans had a more favorable opinion of Twitter (16% vs. 12%) and YouTube (6% vs. 0%) compared to the other group.

So I'm not alone in seeing the value in Twitter, and losing that "loving feeling" somewhat towards Facebook. They're both great but for very different reasons.

As a community manager in the domain of social media, you are accountable to two groups of individuals: 1) Management and 2) Target Audience. 1) Management. To substantiate your role as a content curator and the tools that you have selected to utilize, you may have to assess the approach that is in place. Here are three quick tips to do so.

For all of the attention paid to metrics, one part of the core marketing process is rarely discussed: the middle of the funnel. These three crucial metrics are based on performance data rather than survey responses. Most importantly, performance data can be used across campaigns, enabling advertisers to identify benchmarks, targets, and other shared intelligence that set standards and expectations.

Here are three reasons that explain the difficulty in tracking and calculating social media ROI.

Social media starts as a small test on the side. Unlike other components of the marketing mix, social media marketing is something we'll try because it's cheap. As a result, it doesn't have a strategy and the related metrics to track. Later, when data is needed, analysts may not have optimal information.

Social media interaction tends to happen outside of the purchase process, either before or after. This doesn't mean that social media's contribution doesn't yield a return, but rather that it's not tracked and incorporated into the firm's ongoing metrics.

Social media leverages corporate resources that are already accounted for in other ways. At least in the short term, social media marketing appears to be "free."

Very true, it's often hard to tell whether a sale or lead comes directly from advertising efforts, or was caused by or at least influenced by social media efforts.

Establish goals for your social media marketing and related metrics that can effectively track your progress and allow you to tweak your social media campaign to improve its effectiveness. To that end, these five social media metrics are useful and relatively easy to integrate into your existing marketing tracking.